Dubya Rides Again

But this time his days in the saddle won't be many

Freedom lost the vote,
War and intolerance won,
Cry for our children. — Anonymous

A haiku expressing what most of my discerning, sensitive, and caring friends felt post-midnight election eve.

This toxic mixture of anger and fear congealing in our guts.  Like helplessly watching a lynch mob break down the jailhouse door to hang an innocent man.  Or, more fittingly neo-Puritanical, witnessing the mass hysteria of some holy throng clamoring for a minister to torch some poor woman as a witch or, worse, a temptress.

Ironically, Pontius Pilate relinquishing Jesus to crucifixion must have felt similar pangs.

The agony cannot be overstated, nor the reality of its origins denied.

"Not in a civilized country, not in a civilized country!"

We're human beings here.  We think for ourselves.  We respect logic and facts.  Our ultimate authority is the judgment of our independent minds.  No rational human being, for that matter no true Christian, believes in substituting someone else's judgment—not the priest, not the preacher, not the Pope, not Rush Limbaugh, not Jerry Falwell, not Queen Latifah, not some Anthropomorphic Ghost—for his or her own.

In four years, the Bush administration ran up a record debt, increased funding/power of every major government department, violated civil liberties of tens of thousands of people, would eagerly have banned lifesaving cloning and reproductive choice, knowingly exposed Americans to the most abominable acts of terror (first enabling the perpetrators then failing to apprehend them), refused to accept responsibility for its actions, lied ceaselessly about its negligence, and—most important—

launched a war under false pretenses!

Reason, science, literally a dozen books (many by departing insiders at the White House with more than a century of public-service credentials among them)(1), and every piece of journalistic evidence shows George Bush and his big-government behind-the-scenes corporate-state buddies constitute an exceptional, unsurpassed threat to the liberty, wealth, security, and safety of every citizen of the planet.

The threat is demonstrably greater than any conceivable damage any program, however socialist or economically discredited, John Kerry would remotely be able to put through Congress.  Further, the threat is greater than any posed by radical Islamic terrorists (see the Big Lie discussion at end).

If you have two candidates, one of whom has launched a war under false pretenses, the other who has not… and shows little inclination to do so, what is the correct vote?  A disturbing number of Americans failed the acid test.

"How could these people—many of whom are not raving theolunatics and who even may elicit positive personal feelings from us under normal circumstances—possibly vote for a blatantly (even pridefully) ignorant, lying, murderous, fascist stooge?!"

By the way, this is not my question, only what a lot of people I know are asking.  Considering Adolf Hitler was initially elected to office, the question is not an idle one.

I have three observations:

1. If we establish a one-to-one relationship between actual votes cast and votes recorded and reported as valid, particularly in battleground states, Bush did not win the election.
2. Kerry would have won the recorded election result had he shown any hint of openness to the coming new libertarian ideological consensus, particularly in economics.
3. The evangelical "fringe" has mainstreamed, and Bush/Rove shamelessly catered to it; they mined that virulent, menacing gap of reason for millions of votes.

For the first two observations, I have some brief commentary and references.  Item no. 3, the cultural Reason Gap, receives the majority of discussion here and in subsequent columns.

1) Bushwhacking the Vote

The credibility of the vote has been questioned almost from the moment the polls closed.  And for good reason.  Following the well-documented historical fact of the theft of the 2000 election by Bush-Cheney in Florida (confirmed by post-facto mainstream media reports of a Gore win, and detailed by numerous investigators—esp. UK investigative journalist Greg Palast in his book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy), voters complained about old machines and paper ballots.

The previous sentence is from Larry Chin in his highly topical From the Wilderness cybercolumn.  Chin continues by presenting a tightly argued, if heated, case that these voter complaints furnished the pretext for the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) of 2002 that led to the frenetic mass installation of unverifiable, hackable computer voting machinery across the country.

Four main corporate entities are responsible for the proliferation and implementation of this "black box" voting technology: Diebold, ESS, Sequoia, and Science Applications International (SAIC).  These ostensibly competitive businesses interconnect with one another and with major corporate sponsors, especially the famed Carlyle Group, of the Bush administration.  Their people are his people, so to speak.  And vice versa.

I'll leave the gentle reader to do further investigation along these lines and jump a few links to discover the big picture.  In any case, "there's trouble in River City, folks."  Colin Shea, a well-known writer familiar with exit polling, published his sentiments on the Zogby site (Zogby is an internationally recognized public opinion poller and assessor).

Finally, a distinguished political science professor from the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Steven F. Freeman, published an analysis on the Web entitled The Unexplained Exit Poll Discrepancy.  His analysis demonstrates the statistical impossibility of the discrepancies between exit polling data and recorded election results in the 10 battleground states.  Further, all of the discrepancies were toward Bush.

Ladies and gentlemen, the election of George Bush did not legitimately occur.  As a minimum, based on the evidence cited, two things have to happen quickly:

1. An impartial citizens' investigatory panel must be empowered to determine the source of the errors, and to recommend remedies and assign criminal penalties, if fraud is determined to have occurred.
2. A reelection must be held as soon as possible in battleground states, at a minimum, using audited and verifiable voting technology.

I encourage everyone to write letters to your Congresspeople to enlist their assistance in effecting these modest corrective measures.

2) Kerry's Flunking of Libertarian Economics 101

Despite Kerry's record as supporting a government living within its means, he stubbornly continued to give lipservice to cobwebbed, tarnished ideas of the old tax-and-spend Democrats.  Specifically, consider the following three items:

1. The sacrosanctity of Social Security—Kerry is probably the only political figure in either party who truly believes this antiquated, compulsory, pay-as-you-go, Ponzi boondoggle is solvent and doesn't represent a progressively insidious ripoff of young American workers.  His failure to consider the idea of marketizing the retirement system is a major mistake.
2. The retax the rich canard—True, the Bush Whackocracy was dishonest in cutting taxes because it unleashed record spending in all areas.  The answer, however, is not to undo the cuts, rather to use these cuts as an opportunity to cut spending and sell government assets.  Interestingly, the worst thing you can do for poor people is take wealth from the productive rich—who invest and hire—and turn it over to destructive government.
3. The "We aren't spending enough on education" mantra—The Department of Education is a giant rathole for money.  It always was.  Bush in four years doubled the DoE budget to $60 billion.  That's a lot of clams, baby.  Kerry complained persistently that more of the $60 billion should be transferred from the useless educational bureaucracy in Washington to useless educational bureaucracies in the states.

Note in each of above areas the actual Bush record was at least as destructive as anything one would reasonably expect from Kerry.  But perception is everything.  Kerry sounded more big government than Bush already was, so the Karl Rove spinmasters turned Kerry into a raving socialist.  If Kerry had simply taken moderate free-market positions in the above three areas, he would have won.

By the way, as for Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam War: Right On, Brother!

3) The Reason Gap

A recent Gallup poll reports 44% of the American population believes in "premillennial dispensationalism"—a secular name for this belief is "rapturism"—an elaborate doomsday scenario from a 19^th century priest, wherein born-again Christians rise as spirits into heaven to watch God slaughter nonbelievers before the second coming of Christ.

The 44% number is probably high, as other polls show between 15 and 18 percent of voters belong to churches or movements that subscribe to rapturism.  Significantly, these latter polls indicate 33% of Republicans so believe, including the House majority leader Tom DeLay and (former) attorney general John Ashcroft.(2)

Note

This bizarre belief has direct foreign policy implications because it holds the Jews (Israel) must gather territory from the Nile to the Euphrates in order to provoke a war with the Infidel, at which point God burns everyone except for 144,000 Jews who are allowed to convert to Christianity before the Messiah returns.

Conservatively, let's say 25% of the vote for George Bush came from rapturists.

This means Kerry lost as many as 15 million votes to the far side of the Reason Gap—the Reason Gap being the separation in base mental functioning between those who cling to some semblance of objective reality in their philosophies of life and those inclined to ward off evil spirits by reading chicken entrails and whipping themselves into a frenzy.

Garry Wills' column in the New York Times, "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out," points out that more people in America believe in the Virgin Birth than believe in Darwin's theory of evolution.

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values - critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences.  Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity.

They addressed 'a candid world,' as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of 'a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.'  Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush's supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

— Wills, Garry. "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out,"
New York Times 4 Nov. 2004. (Reg. Req.)

Thus, Bush received a large number of his votes from people who think reason is a four-letter word.  Within the broad realm of those concerned with ideas in American society, many advocate faith and obedience rather than reason as the moral basis of human action.  We at Reason to Freedom challenge that view, and are working toward closing the Reason Gap by turning thousands of the reason "have-nots" into reason "haves."

When rationality is restored to its rightful place as the grounding principle and cardinal virtue in our lives, liberty, happiness, and prosperity will follow.  The alternative to reason is grim: Herr Bush and Herr Cheney are harbingers of the witch-hunts that will readily rush into the political and moral vacuum created when reason is sent to the back of the bus.

Before moving on to the conclusion, I want to comment briefly on the peculiar smugness that seemed to emanate from many pro-Bush political commentators upon his alleged victory.  Some main-guy writer at National Review, Andrew Sullivan and former senator Alan Simpson (R-WY) on Bill Maher's Real Time, one of the MSNBC partisans, the business writer of my local newspaper, etc.

Like anti-intellectual bullies, they seemed to say, "See, you've been dismissing us as illiterate moral hypocrites who wear our Bibles on our bumpkins.  You made no concessions to our heartfelt fantasies, made no attempt to attract our piety to your cause.  Well, we just whacked you upside the head.  Now, you have to do what we say.  Who says might doesn't make right!  How's that feel Mr. Smartypants?  You'll have to pay attention to us now, I reckon."

Fortunately, I don't think so.

If election fraud doesn't derail the Bush/Cheney train, the Big Lie of 9/11 surely will.

###

The Bush/Cheney Syndicate (BCS) and the Big Lie of 9/11

What I've conveyed to this point pertains mainly to the election and its aftermath.  I just suggested Bush/Cheney represent the penultimate step of descent into totalitarian hell.  Earlier I claimed the threat posed by the hidden government of BCS "is greater than any posed by radical Islamic terrorists."  Before leaving you, I need to justify the previous two assertions.

Of all the works referenced below, Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon is the most thoroughly researched Weltanschauung of the unconstitutional, power-elite (PE) conspiracy behind the United States Government today.  Ruppert is particularly enlightening on the BCS, which focuses maniacally on a world empire based on military supremacy over oil-source countries and a CIA/Wall Street monopoly on international drug trafficking.

Please do the reading yourself.

In the greatest generality, throughout the 20^th century the move toward large government accelerated to reach critical mass.  At that point, what I refer to as the power-elite (a generally well-focused conspiracy of huge financial interests with international reach) coalesced to effectively control all public and financial affairs of the country.  (Still the best reference, though now somewhat dated, for understanding the power-elite is Professor Carroll Quigley's Tragedy and Hope (1966); other more current sources are easily found.)

The PE, which has still not shredded the entire Constitution, is not omnipotent, but it is definitely in the driver's seat.  It cannot shut down all freedoms immediately; it does not want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.  But it has an insatiable appetite, a wanton, mindless lust, for continued (unearned) money and power.

The root of money and power is energy.  And for the last century, oil has been the root of energy, as shown in Paul Roberts' The End of Oil.  Both Roberts and Ruppert inform us the planet has reached or is soon to reach what is called Peak Oil, a condition in which the majority of the world's oil reserves over history have been consumed.  Bah Bye.

Let's pause for a moment to argue that were the US economy or the world economy functioning on free market principles, and true free trade prevailed, oil scarcity would not present a particularly difficult problem.  As free citizens and independent business enterprises, everyone would trade for the oil we need on the international market.

If oil become insufficient, or became too costly environmentally, or some countries did not want to trade oil with us, or sources of oil were stuck in conflict that drove prices up, energy alternatives to oil would become attractive.  In an international free market system, the world would already have peacefully turned substantially to renewables (solar, wind), hydrogen, biomass fuels (agricultural hemp!), and, most recently, fail-safe nuclear power.

But we don't have a free market world or a free-market country.  Especially with BCS, we have a PE country led by thrashing, gilded oil-barron dinosaurs who think in terms of military domination and conquest of client states instead of "open and honest relations with all nations, entangling alliances with none."

Instead of open, free trade, the BCS says: "If you don't give us the oil, we'll take it.  We will ruthlessly destroy whoever is in the way.  And we will suppress alternative energy technology at all costs.  And, oh, by the way, f**k the environment!"

Now you have the qui bono of the attacks of 9/11, i.e. motive: the pretext for war.

Means and opportunity remain to be established.

One of the most telling signs of this country's abandonment of the Constitution and any pretense at reasonable government is the fact, increasingly—from FDR's foreknowledge of the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941(3) to the FBI/NTSB coverup of TWA Flight 800(4)— government engages in the Big Lie about major catastrophes or its own atrocities.  These instances of overt, blatant deceit are so numerous as to be universal.

Note

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique, wherein the government tells the people something so obviously false that people tend to believe it.  They tend to believe it because they think NO ONE would tell people something so obviously false, therefore it must be true.  A Big Lie would be Hitler publicizing that he's rounding up the Jews to send them on skiing vacations.

The four-airliner mystery flights and two-airplane physical encounters with the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 remain to be explained.  These events have not been treated as a crime.  There has been no investigation.  (In a crime investigation, you don't throw away the debris of an explosion without sifting through it for clues, and sharing your knowledge with the public.)

The most glaring example, which I only recently ran across:

No evidence exists of an airplane of any kind, much less a Boeing 757 airliner (American Airlines, Flight 77), striking the Pentagon.  This remarkable Big Lie, among several others on that day of infamy, is laid to rest once and for all in the video 911 In Plane Site, available from ThePowerHour.com.

Think about it for a second and you'll know what I've just stated is absolutely true.  Nobody saw any evidence or received any evidence that a plane of any size penetrated the Pentagon!  (All we got were mainstream-media statements to that effect.)  The photographic evidence is contrary: something besides a large commercial airliner full of fuel struck the Pentagon.

"Where's da plane, boss?  Where's da plane?"

What the authors of the In Plane Site video have done—and what Michael Ruppert has done even more thoroughly in Crossing the Rubicon—is perform the service of the little boy in The Emperor's New Clothes, innocently exclaiming that the emperor is naked.

Thanks to the courage and honesty of the "little boys," among us, we know beyond a reasonable doubt the actions of 9/11 were carefully planned and orchestrated, not by Osama bin Laden—though certainly some of his fodder became "cannonized"—rather by "agency" inside our own government, possibly in cooperation with "agency" of other governments.

Did the President and Vice President know?  Well, gee, leaders of the free world involved in a crime and a coverup?  Like that's gonna happen.  Right.  But as unlikely as that would ever be (on the planet Neptune), a lot of normal people think a real crime investigation is in order.  If we don't do this, if we don't investigate, and then if finding guilt, if we let the leaders of the government get away with their crime, the USA is toast.

Colloquially, in regard to the president himself—who is emblematic of everything that is wrong and deadly in the current government—I like the way Hunter Thompson puts it in his interview by Robert Chalmers in The Independent of the UK:

If this president is re-elected, we are facing the total death of the American Dream as I know it, and I have spent a lot of time knowing it. I would tell them [the American people] that if this gang of criminals gets in once more, we will be in the position of a family who has sent the Hell's Angels written invitations to its Thanksgiving party.

— Hunter Thompson, 2004

I sure grok the Gonzomeister sentiment…

But being into "the positive energy thing" of late, I feel the 9/11 resolution—as horrific as it will be to realize the truth of mass murder of such dimension being an inside job—will wash out the Augean stables of the government, so to speak, end the rule of the power-elite, restore Constitutional, very-limited government once and for all.

Thus from a hopeful libertarian perspective, we have a great opportunity.  The timetable for rational liberty has just moved up, and all those people who were killed so tragically will be enshrined forever as the continued inspiration for a free country and a free planet.

---

1. Major works that detail the president's malfeasance, as well others that provide context of the secret government behind his actions, and the actions of his predecessors: back to text
   - Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke (former WH counterterrorism expert)
   - Plan of Attack, Bob Woodward
   - The Bush Betrayal, James Bovard
   - Terrorism and Tyranny, James Bovard
   - Worse than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George Bush, John W. Dean
   - The Price of Loyalty, Paul O'Neill (former Treasury Secretary to Bush)
   - Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, Robert Baer
   - The End of Oil, Paul Roberts (the energy policy backdrop)
   - Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, Michael Ruppert
   - Heinberg, Richard Powerdown. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island: 2004.
2. Articles by George Monbiot and Nancy Garascia in Playboy, October 2004 (pg. 52) and November 2004 (pg. 96) issues, respectively. back to text
3. Stinnett, Robert B., Day of Deceit. Simon and Schuster, New York: 2000. back to text
4. Jack Cashill and James Sanders, First Strike: TWA Flight 800 and the Attack on America. WND Books, Nashville, TN: 2003. back to text